In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside

and then pulls himself up, with one hand on the TV, his other hand holding his trousers up. In the depths of his chest a tulip of desperation sprouts, bursts and fades, all in the blink of an eye, as if it’s a time-lapse sequence from a film by David Attenborough. His head sags, his chin on his chest. He suppresses the raw scream that rises up in him and staggers to the bathroom.

      And then there’s the steam, the water clattering down, his hair turning liquid, his skin, himself. Water, clear, clean. This is the moment when he’s empty and without thoughts. For a moment even without memories, without worries and fretting, and without the brilliant ideas for which he is famous and which make him so terribly tired. Just the water streaming over him and he a thing, yes, that’s what it feels like, as if he’s an object, a wall, a roof, a street, a clinker path beneath heavy trees as the first drips fall tapping on the roof of leaves and the downpour that then explodes spills through the foliage and turns the stones dark and gleaming, and while the water slithers down the gutters and washes over the pavement, over the thresholds of houses, into cellars, up stairs, among chairs and tables, armchairs come running and rolling, bobbing from the houses, the whole world is water, the treetops are little islands of dripping green above the surface, so he, Marcus, is flooded and vanished, something that is nothing and something that no longer matters.

      He is, face raised into the needles of water from the shower, pure. Empty and pure. His fingers unwrap the greaseproof paper of a piece of hotel soap that imagines it smells of roses. He lets his big hands run with the tiny bar of soap along the slopes of his armpits, over the ridges of his pelvis, through the thicket of his crotch, the long journey down his legs to his feet and then back up again, his ribcage, back, arms, till finally, as if he hasn’t been standing long enough with his head thrown back in the falling water, his face.

      Pure and clean as a whistle.

      And at that moment, when the shower stream washes away the foam and rains down on his closed eyes, he sees very clearly, as if it was yesterday, as if they’ve only just met each other, and he hasn’t yet closed his heart and his face and his eyes, at that moment he sees Chaja disappearing into the packed Saturday morning shop, her black curly hair among the Saturday heads of the provincial shoppers. He stands in the Saturday sun, looks at the bare house-fronts and the Saturday air up there, clear and blue, as if it’s going to be a fine day in spite of everything.

       Chapter 10

      Seven o’clock is the hour when the good people of Assen have finished their dinner, hot dinner, simple, nourishing meals of potatoes, meat and vegetables and semolina pudding with a skin for afters.

      But where we are, no one is eating. Here, nothing is consumed but beer.

      The Hotel de Jonge is the nodal point in the history of Assen, the place through which all paths lead, a drinking hole in the desert of life, set on a square that doesn’t want to be a square. Off at an angle to the right it is watched, constantly and unmoved, by the law court, an island in the middle of a shapeless lake of lawn (behind it the old jailhouse, so visibly old that many a lawbreaker dreads the wheel and the rack and dark cellars where water seeps down the walls and rats as big as pet dogs shuffle under the simple bench), to the left lies a confluence of streets that is almost a little square. (But the town has no real squares, just attempts in that direction, wide sheets of stone that bear the name, but aren’t: deserted car parks and collisions between streets that have fallen ashamed into each other’s arms as they meet. Just as the town has no statues. Yes, not that far from the Hotel de Jonge, actually the only statue in the town, on the Brink – again, not a square – in a few years a shapeless lump of gingerbread will be placed, a gift from a local manufacturer. It represents a cooper bending over his barrel, but looks more like something left behind by a constipated elephant. It will be placed in the bend of the road and for some miraculous reason no car ever crashes into it.)

      The Hotel de Jonge. A sleepy provincial hotel-café-restaurant in a sleepy provincial town.

      But not tonight, tonight Assen is the town of towns and we anticipate the night of nights, the night before the TT bike races, yes, this town of roughly forty thousand inhabitants is suddenly four or five times as big, which is to say: four or five times as many people, four or five times as much violence and sex and traffic and at least four hundred times as much beer. In the bar of the Hotel de Jonge the drinkers are already standing shoulder to shoulder, crotch to buttock, face to neck, in the stench of human bodies, beer and smoke all through the room, lined entirely with rustic oak, designed in a style that makes you think of haciendas without really losing the je ne sais quoi which tells you straight away that you are indeed in the deepest provinces. The drinkers shuffle across the endless reddish-brown tile floor that spreads through the bar like a flood of seventies cosiness and is so omnipresent, extending even to the toilets, that one of the younger customers once observed that it’s like drinking in a hollowed-out stone. To the right of the central bar, a big room that can be separated off with a beige folding door, and on the left the breakfast room, again behind a little barrier for special events. All crammed full of drinkers.

      In the middle of the building rises the staircase, all in brown-painted wood. It leads to seventeen rooms almost all of which were booked a year ago by journalists, one or two racing fans, the manager of a racing driver and, the smallest small room, at the end of the long corridor, by Marcus Kolpa.

      In the main bar, that hole of wood and tiles, the landlord buys off the first fight of the evening with a free round of beer and the servility disguised as affability that is his trademark. The floor is already wet, the windows are misted up. The waitress, who has just been goosed by a jolly German, causing her to drop her tray, making the floor even wetter than before with glass that now crunches under the biker boots, the waitress is now sitting in the kitchen on a crate of white bread rolls crying her eyes out. Everything is fine, everything is as it should be, the till tinkles so unceasingly that it sounds like music.

      Ah, there is so much pleasure and merriment, such loud affirmation of the free-market economy (and that in these difficult times of deep financial crisis!), that a vitality, you might even call it an ‘atavism’, hovers in the air, so tangible that you could almost cut it with a knife. And that’s why it isn’t even slightly strange when Marcus, washed and perfumed now, black-suit-white-shirt, his unruly dark hair wet along the temples, makes his entrance and a loud voice rings out from the densely packed crowd: ‘A vicar!’ Out rings the generous bellow of simple people who enjoy simple jokes. He looks questingly around. He raises one eyebrow, ignores the landlord’s apologetic smile and immediately dashes outside, pausing for a moment like a ship leaving a stormy harbour and powering up its engine before breaking through the waves.

      Outside it’s packed with people. In spite of the weather, a cool evening, just about to rain, the terrace is packed with drinkers. But Marcus cleaves through the turbulence, slaloms, swings, weaves his way through the crowd, turns blindly off to the right, strides onwards on his long tall legs and doesn’t come to rest until fifty metres on, when he runs aground in a new crowd formed by a throng of evangelical bikers, a leather-clad army of the Lord gliding like a flight of black angels on their Harleys and Hondas and Ducatis and Yamahas and BMWs along the Brink and past the law court, watched by dense rows of cheering passers-by.

      To the left, on the trampled grass of the Brink, a heaving, whooping crowd throngs around a mechanical bull. To the right, people are frolicking in front of a big tent where as they wait for the band a kind of music is being played which Marcus can only describe as ‘farmers’ rock’. Someone falls through a shop window. Two straggly adolescents climb the roof of the tent and slide down the slope of the canvas. A biker girl pulls her leather jacket open and shows her swelling breasts to a ring of leather-clad youths (a surprisingly large number of them in clogs).

      And everywhere noise, the smell of fat and meat and stale beer.

      Marcus shuts his eyes and tries to find a still point.

      The world.

      The world he lives in.

      The world